Tuberville Tried to Defend That SOTU Response. It Did Not Go to Plan.
While pretty much everybody unanimously hated the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, at least one conservative loved it … albeit for all the wrong reasons.
Republicans tapped one of their youngest lawmakers, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, to helm the response. Over the course of 17 choked-up minutes, Britt, holed up in a kitchen somewhere, staccato-skipped her way through heavy topics, including immigration, sex trafficking, the curtailing of human rights (but not women’s), national security, and foreign affairs. Between the awkward pain behind her voice that most viewers read as disingenuous, and the Steven King–esque smile glitched between forced sorrows, Bette Midler rated Britt’s performance a D-, and her policies an F.
But amid the frenzy of criticism, Alabama’s other senator, Tommy Tuberville, attempted to pass along a compliment to the 42-year-old. Still, even he couldn’t see past the image of a little woman tucked away behind her big kitchen table.
“She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” Tuberville told HuffPost, apparently seeing the diminished image as a good thing. “I mean, she did what she was asked to do. I thought she did a good job. And it’s hard when you’ve never done anything like that.”
Tuberville said much the same during a Newsmax appearance on Friday, claiming Britt was the right choice (to be used by the party hell-bent on stripping abortion access) because “she’s a mom” and a “housewife.”
Tuberville essentially said the same thing during a Newsmax appearance today:
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 8, 2024
"I thought she did very well. You know, she’s a mom, she’s a housewife... I thought Katie was a was a very good choice. She did a very good job." pic.twitter.com/xU8dfI6tY2
People were, unsurprisingly, aghast at the patronizing message.
“Journalists should just ask Tommy Tuberville about everything; he’s always going to say the dumbest fucking thing possible,” posted Hysteria podcast host Erin Gloria Ryan.
“‘Picked as a housewife.’ Britt is a United States senator. Just like Tuberville is,” wrote Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman.
It’s just another of a dozen such blunders that Tuberville has made in recent memory, highlighting his complete disregard for how the other half of the human race lives. Last month, Tuberville let slip that he couldn’t be bothered to read up on a court decision that stripped in vitro fertilization access within his state, even in the days that followed the ruling.